Empathy and the landscape of conflict

In early August 2018, the Toowoomba Regional Art Gallery (TRAG) in Queensland opened a group exhibition titled Landscape and Memory: Frank Hurley and a Nation Imagined. The artworks created by the eight invited artists responded to official war photographer Frank Hurley’s iconic images taken on the Western Front and in the Middle East in 1917 and 1918. The approach adopted by the artists was framed by the work of Samuel Hynes who argued that though the First World War was without doubt the major political and military event of the age, it was also a 'great imaginative event', one which 'altered the ways in which men and women thought not only about war but about the world, and about culture and its expressions' (Hynes, 1990, p. xi). This imagining is a version of the war 'that confirms a set of attitudes, an idea of what the war was and what it meant' (Hynes, 1990, p. xi). Such an historical imagining is not, however, synonymous with falsehood; instead, it refers to the layers of cultural meaning that over time encase an historical event (Badsey, 2009). Such an historical imagining is not, however, synonymous with falsehood; instead, it refers to the layers of cultural meaning that over time encase an historical event (Badsey, 2009). This chapter therefore explores the artists’ contemporary reimagining of Hurley’s photographs and a desire to create art that was empathetic to the artist’s original intentions yet able to stand alone as distinct works of art that interrogate the place of war and landscape in the Australian psyche